We Reminisce: The Man, The Myth – Jerry Joseph

“My man… WTF happened to you?”

It was high school, the summer before sophomore year. The gym was baking. The sun was glazing us, coming right through the windows, and yet we played on.

He had been growing, getting taller and filling out his jersey. Everyone had noticed, but it was all just in passing. What’s the difference between 5-10 and 6-0? It’s hardly noticeable. Maybe he gets an extra rebound or a few deflections at the head of the press that he couldn’t reach before. But he was still skinny as a chicken wing.

It was some weekend in June – or maybe it was July… or maybe August – when he showed up seemingly 6-7 overnight and everything clicked. He had close to 20 blocked shots in one weekend of AAU after having perhaps 20 in our first three summers together combined. Now he was running his mouth, talking junk, backing it up, acting like an entirely different person, someone who had gone from a very good high school player to a scholarship prospect in the span of a week or two.

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He had changed so much on the court. What was once a 5-10 slow point guard with great skills but hardly enough of a body to make use of them had turned into a 6-7 swingman who could bang threes, block shots and go coast-to-coast for dunks.

And yet, you could’ve thrown him into a different uniform, allowed him to grow out his hair, gave him a different number in a different state with a different name and I would’ve still been able to pick him out in a gym. The way he spoke. His awkward gait. His smooth game. It would’ve taken me all of 30 seconds of watching him play to know who he was, even if he had just suddenly grown seven inches in a few weeks. He was still the same person, just a lot taller.

That story from my life helps explain what eventually happened to Jerry Joseph. Joseph was at the center of a 2010 basketball scandal at the famed Permian Panthers High School, otherwise known as the school from Friday Night Lights. Showing up out of nowhere – he said he had been homeless in Haiti – Joseph stood out because he looked like a man amongst ninth graders. Literally.

GQ detailed it all back in July in one of the craziest stories you’ll ever hear about:

Basketball coach Melvon Anders was in the Nimitz gym a few days later and saw Jerry take his shirt off. “I was like, Jee-sus Christ!” he says. The kid had all sorts of tattoos, inflated pecs, and shoulders like a racehorse. He’d never met a freshman like him. Then again, plenty of kids have tattoos these days, and this kind of early development is not unheard of, especially in basketball. When LeBron James was 16 and already nationally known, he could have passed for 24. As a junior in high school, Greg Oden looked like a middle-aged man.

The coach kept an eye on Jerry when classes started. Most kids that size are magnets for fistfights, but in his four months at Nimitz, Jerry never got into a single one, unless you count the brawl he broke up before it started. He was studious, a hard worker—”a pleasure to have in class, actually,” Anders says. Despite never attending a school of any kind in Haiti—which of course meant no school records to transfer in—Jerry breezed through his accelerated “catch-up” curriculum. He explained that when he was little, his relatives brought him textbooks from the United States. He had a slight accent but spoke English well. A few of the teachers joked that Jerry was secretly an adult. Once a teacher mistook him for a substitute.

The basketball part probably struck people as odd. But they all wanted to believe it. Maybe this was the next LeBron James. And he was at their school. That’s all it took for everyone to fall in love. They wanted to believe in the next big thing. They wanted to believe in hope.

Off the court, his stories were even more unique, like something out of a fantasy novel. And when he worked at a concession stand over one summer, people started asking.

GQ wrote:

At Nimitz, Jerry never asked for a handout, which, of course, made people all the more willing to help. That summer, when school let out, some of the coaches recommended him for a job in the concession stand at the public pool. Melvon Anders supervised him. Jerry was popular with the teenage girls, a good employee—never late, never snapped at anyone, never had any money missing from his register. One dry-roasted day in August, someone asked him about his home, and Jerry pulled up Google maps on an iPhone. He showed a group, Anders included, a mountain in Haiti where he grew up. He said that most of his life was spent herding goats. They all listened dumbstruck. Goats? A hut on a mountainside? “Who were we to question his story,” Anders says. “He was the first Haitian most of us had ever met.”

People thought he was a gift from God. Literally. When Port-au-Prince was devastated by an earthquake at the beginning of 2010, that only fueled the town’s beliefs. For some reason, God had sent this prodigy to them. He was on a mission that seemed bigger than basketball.

After a season as the area’s Newcomer of the Year, Joseph was a recruiting dream, and was soon traveling all over the country playing AAU. At one point, a team from Florida spotted him. One of the coaches walked up and asked him: “Hey, Guerd, what’s going on? What you doin’ here?” Joseph acted like he had no clue who the man was.

[Related: We Reminisce – Hakeem Olajuwon’s Lost Finals]

Things started getting weird. The players and coaches from Florida were convinced he was a 22-year-old man who went back to high school. They started contacting Joseph’s school and the area newspapers. Eventually, they confronted the kid, err man, on it and he denied it. Several times. It wasn’t until they found a passport for “Guerdwich Montimere” did they believe it.

Turns out he was a former high school basketball player from Florida, a kid who came with his family from Haiti. He wasn’t quite good enough, and when the real world hit him in the face, he told it he was still going to play. One family fight later and he was out the door, desperately trying to rekindle the hoop flame.

He eventually found it in Texas, as well as a 15-year-old girlfriend for the 22-year-old posing as a high school kid.

The story ended with Guerdwich Montimere in jail facing six felony charges, including sexual assault, which could’ve land him in prison for 20 years. He would eventually plead guilty to two counts of sexual assault and three counts of tampering with government records, and was sentenced to three years in prison.

How crazy is this? What would happen if you went back to high school?

Follow Sean on Twitter at @SEANesweeney.

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